Artist Trina Olson has her hand in history – quite literally. The painter/sculptor/writer has spent years scouring, sourcing and studying archival documents, iconography and literature to sustain her near-obsession with channeling the past into her work.

The result is a collage format that is as much a blend of her own story as the medieval tales and noir, mid-century narratives that compel her.

A professional photographer, graphic designer, writer and teacher, Olson went back to painting a few years ago but her tenured career paths are evident in all she creates. Olson incorporates short fiction, literature and eastern teachings as backdrop to interpreted historical motifs and ephemera as well as actual, vintage clips of graphic design, comics.

“I started calling this ‘History in My Hands,’” says Olson, “but the truth is that I’m drawn to people’s stories and moments in time and when I begin to paint, I have no idea what I’m going to do. It just happens. I’m informed by my research but the work itself tells its own story.”

This trajectory of subliminal storytelling began with a series set in the 1940s and a collaboration with another writer who helped spurn the visual narrative. “If you turn the paintings over you can read the story,” says Olson, who also references The Upanishads, Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums and excerpts from the Nuremberg Trials in her work. Olson says she knew the work was taking a turn when she was compelled to paint a medieval death urn atop collaged 1940s and newspaper clippings about a Manhattan suicide from the same era.

What rose from the ashes was her current trajectory of metallic paint-infused sirens splayed upon large canvases with verbiage as layered background. From Byzantine bombshells to mermaids to embattled queens, the work’s energy is distinctly feminine. Like Olson herself, these women emerge from a time rife with darkness and misogyny and crown themselves as queens of their own destiny.

When she isn’t in her studio, Trina Olson teaches Photography and Digital Arts at Reynolds High School, is a mother of two and has a weekly game of Dungeons & Dragons where she slays on a regular basis.